Maverick

As far as I can tell Maverick has two major problems (spoilers in this whole thing, but do you really care?):

1. Plot confusion.  On the surface it all seems so simple, Maverick (Mel Gibson (The Man Without a Face)) needs $25,000 to enter a lavish poker tournament but keeps running into trouble getting the money together.  Sounds fine to me but they muddy things up with some sort of scam that Maverick and his father, Coop (James Garner (Victor Victoria)), cook up.

Just think about this for a minute.  Maverick and Coop go through everything you see in the movie, including almost getting killed several times and breaking who knows how many laws, in order to discourage one single solitary card shark (James Coburn (Eraser)) from playing again west of the Mississippi.  Not even the entire country or world, but half the US.  That motivation doesn’t make any sense to me but maybe you have to be a card player?

So in the end it wasn’t about Maverick truly digging deep to see how good at poker he really is.  It’s not really about money either.  Those things, along with Maverick falling in love with Annabelle (Jodi Foster (Elysium)), are byproducts of the journey and not the end goal. Pretty fuckin’ weird, right?

2. SuperMav.  Maverick is indestructible in this film.  He survives a confrontation with a notoriously brutal gunfighter, an explosion from a bank robbery, a runaway stagecoach, dangling off the side of a cliff, going up against six armed thugs, being shot at by a bow and arrow and a gun at pretty close range, being hanged and left for dead in the desert with venomous snakes.  And with most of the situations it’s pure dumb luck that gets Maverick out of trouble, like when the tree branch breaks off during his hanging.

I understand that the filmmakers wanted to have exciting and dangerous situations to put Maverick in but he just looks like an asshole and not a formidable character.  It’s not his lightning fast gun draw or his wits or his brute strength that get him out of trouble.  It’s almost always some deus ex machina bullshit that comes to the rescue. 

Gorgeous scenery

There are a bunch of good things about this picture though.  For one, it’s gorgeous to look at.  Director Richard Donner (Scrooged) always does a good job with his clear and straight forward manner.  But I gotta give it up to cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.  He’s got so many ridiculous movies under his belt including Deliverance and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (arguably Spielberg’s best looking film) and he goes to town on this one.  He fills the screen with incredible sweeping shots of the American west and beautiful imagery that any western movie would be jealous of.  This is one helluva pretty picture.

As I just mentioned Donner knows what he’s doing.  Even though the story is mostly dumb he treats it with care and definitely puts some fun action scenes together.  The part with the stagecoach is probably my favorite sequence where they do pretty much everything you can with that setup including hanging off the side of the coach, being dragged and jumping from horse to horse.

The acting is decent with Mel giving a charming performance.  Of course, this is considering you can stand the man (you know because of the whole anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, alcoholic thing).  He does his usual goofball/intensely serious routine but this is much more on the goofball side.  It’s an action comedy after all.  I know I can still enjoy him in shit but he’s certainly an acquired taste.

It was an interesting choice to cast Jodi Foster as the sultry southern belle love interest.  I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that most folks don’t think of Foster as a sex symbol.  Sure, Taxi Driver and The Accused but I think we all see her as Clarice from The Silence of the Lambs, intellectual, reserved, stoic, etc.  Not as a flirty gregarious thief.  Foster does surprisingly well in the role though and shows that she can almost pull off a character like this, almost.

But out of everyone Alfred Molina (Species, Boogie Nights) gives the best performance.  He’s one of the most underrated actors ever in my opinion and shines as the cold-blooded Angel here.  I could watch a whole movie of just this character.  Not only is he one mean sonuvabitch that’ll kick the shit outta you if you look at him funny but he’s also an unbelievable card player.  I mean the guy comes in second at the poker tournament at the end.  I love everything about this character and Molina’s take on him.  He’s big and imposing, his accent is flawless and his facial expressions are spot on.  Good work.

Here’s some other crap I noticed:

- One thing the audience should always be aware of is how much money Maverick currently has and therefore how much more he needs to get to $25,000.  But this basic plot point gets pretty damn unclear.  It’s really when Joseph, Maverick’s Native American friend, asks to see Mav’s $22,000 because he’s never seen that much cash before.  Maverick then has a breakdown because he discovers that Annabelle swapped his dough for newspaper.  So at this point we’re led to believe that he lost everything.  He should have zero dollars right now.  Ok, Joseph gives him $1,000 but still Maverick essentially has to rebuild his whole stash, right?  Well after the Russian hunter scene we find out that Maverick only needs a couple more thousand to bring him up to the full $25,000.  What the fuck just happened?  Either Mav lost his shit over a couple of thousand, which doesn’t make a lot of sense considering he’s been down that much since the beginning of the picture, or he really did lose everything and they didn’t show how he got tens of thousands of dollars back.  Whatever it is the filmmakers fucked up in post putting that part of the movie together.

- There are at least two messages the film puts out there.  One is about how white people stole land from the Native Americans.  Another is about how money isn’t the most important thing after Coop steals the $500,000 from the poker tournament.  Unfortunately with that last one they negate it almost immediately by having Maverick go after Coop later and steal the money back. 

- Cameos, cameos, cameos.  Putting aside James Garner (because he stars in this), who was the original Maverick from the TV show, Danny Glover might be the biggest.  He and Mel have a Lethal Weapon moment where they almost recognize each other and Glover even says “I’m gettin’ too old for this shit”.  It’s cute ‘n all but kinda distracting honestly.  And there are a lot of country music artists that appear in the background and there’s Margot Kidder and etc.

To wrap this up, the film has a real sense of adventure and I love that they crammed in a ton of western movie tropes like poker, gunplay, wise Native Americans, a runaway stagecoach, a bank robbery, etc.  You can tell the filmmakers are fans of the genre (particularly American westerns from the 50’s, makes sense since the TV show inhabited both of those qualities) and their enthusiasm tends to rub off.  And the well done genre tinged Randy Newman score puts a nice cap on it.  The happy-go-lucky attitude actually works a lot of the time but the danger factor is significantly reduced as a result.  I know it’s a family friendly western but I still think the balance is off.

I really wanted to like this film but it’s just not that satisfying.  It’s not the worst thing ever though.  It’s still fairly enjoyable if you can get past the messy script (a little surprising considering William Goldman wrote it (The Princess Bride, Marathon Man)).